In Vedic Sanskrit about 150 forms in -si, formed from 23 roots, are used as imperatives of the 2nd singular. Among the most frequent in the Rigveda are yakṣi ‘sacrifice’ (34 times), vakṣi ‘carry, bring’ (25 times), parṣi ‘bring across’ (16 times), neṣi ‘lead’ (10 times), darṣi ‘pierce’ (10 times), satṣi (10 times), rāsi ‘bestow’ (8 times). Until quite recently the position of these forms within the Vedic verbal system has usually been left undecided. In 1955 Burrow merely noted that their ‘termination is identical with that of the 2 sg. indic, pres., but these indicatives are quite clearly distinguished because the presents are differently formed’. Three years earlier, Renou expressed the view that the type in question was ‘une formation autonome, où une ancienne désinence -s a pu être prolongée par un i déictique’. The decisive advance, alluded to above, is due to the recent work of Johanna Narten, but especially to George Cardona's excellent paper published only a year ago. Whereas Narten still insisted that the formation was ‘bildungsmässig ausserhalb des Tempussystems stehend’ (39), although she admitted that in several cases the imperative in -si ‘im vedischen Sprachgefühl wohl zum s- Aorist gerechnet [wurde]‘ (45), Cardona cogently showed that the -si imperative was not only part of the s-aorist system but was most closely linked with the s-aorist subjunctive.

It is well-known that Grassmann's law is restricted in its application in Greek vis-à-vis Sanskrit. In Greek, the rule applies generally to deaspirate an initial underlying aspirated stop in a reduplicating syllable: tithēmi ‘I place’ < *thithēmi, pépheuga ‘I have fled’ < *phé-pheuga, kékhutai ‘it has poured forth’ < *khé-khutai, etc; but within a root it applies only to an initial dental and to /h/ from an underlying /s/: tréphō ‘I nourish’ < *thréphō (cf. thrépsō ‘I shall nourish’), trikhós ‘hair, gen. sg.’ < *thrikhós (cf. thríks ‘hair, nom. sg.’), ékhō ‘I hold’ < *hékhō < *sékhō (cf. héksō ‘I shall hold’, éskhon ‘I held‘), etc. There are no cases in Greek in which a root-initial labial or velar voiceless unaspirated stop alternates with the corresponding aspirated stop.

Elizabethan English in general and Shakespearean English in particular frequently uses pronouns in imperative constructions. The use of these pronouns has no correlation with the age, sex, or social status of the speaker, although Shakespeare does employ certain types of such constructions to indicate dialectal or foreign speech. The pronouns always follow the verb. In the case of constructions with periphrastic do, the pronoun follows do and precedes the main verb, although adverbial elements may come between the pronoun and the main verb.

In 1955, in a review of the Trager-Smith Outline of English structure, I made a first attempt at phonemicizing an old-fashioned dialect of Atlanta, Georgia, which did not seem to fit the overall pattern of nine vowels and three semivowels that Trager and Smith had proposed. Further discussion followed at the First Texas Conference in 1956, where the arguments for a tenth vowel were strengthened by Raven I. McDavid and Sumner Ives; but even the rebellious, at that time, were still working within the Smith and Trager framework, and when their arguments were published in the proceedings of the Conference, they suffered because the secretary who transcribed them had been unable to cope with so many different dialects and because proof-reading had been peccable. A tentative report on the Conference to the 1956 Linguistic Institute at Ann Arbor was received with benevolent amusement, and ensuing debates with myself and Hans Kurath appeared in later numbers of Language and in my Short introduction to English grammar.

The discussion to follow will be concerned with a number of occurrences of noch in written and spoken German. Typical examples are these:

1. (a) 'Der Hund ist fort, rief die junge Frau. ‘Nein, sieh doch her, er liegt immer noch da.’ (Elisabeth Langgässer, Jetzt geht die Welt unter)

2. (b) Der Kellner kam und brachte den Kaffee. ‘Bringen Sie mir noch einen grossen Kirsch dazu,' sagte ich. (Erich Maria Remarque, Drei Kameraden)

3. (c) Sollte Klotho heissen, nicht Claire, der traut man es noch zu, dass sie Lebensfäden spinnt. (Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch der alten Dame)

The two papers on Mandarin phonology by C. F. Hockett which appeared in 1947 and 1950 are exemplary cases of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics at its best. They demonstrate clearly the insight to be gained by intelligent analysis which is independent of traditional work while not ignorant of it.

The contribution of Hockett's analysis and its high degree of independence from particular sectarian bias about how languages must be analyzed is shown by the fact that one can use his phonemes in writing generative phonological rules which take relative ordering as a substantive property of language, in spite of the striking difference between such a framework and that used by Hockett in the articles cited.

0.1. The Kartvelian (South Caucasian) languages form a group of closely related dialects consisting of Georgian (with an old literary tradition going back to the 5th century A.D.), Megrelian, Chan (or Laz), and Svan.

0.2. The Kartvelian languages may be viewed as descendants of a common language that existed in the past, of which different transformations yielded historically attested cognate linguistic systems. The ancestral common language (Common Kartvelian) is not recorded in documents. We arrive at it by special methods of reconstruction.